Services such as a mailbox file transfer station, and offline download have a great number of media files in various forms, for example, videos. When a user needs to play a file by using a terminal such as a personal computer or a mobile phone online, the file can be viewed only by downloading the file previously, and transcoding the downloaded file into a file in a format that is supported by a mobile phone terminal or a player.
In order that a client can play a file directly online without needing to transcode the file, major video service companies purchase dedicated video transcoding servers and dedicated storage servers. A server side transfers data to a video transcoding server for transcoding, then transfers a transcoded video file to a storage server, and stores the transcoded video file, for a user to download. This offline transcoding manner enables the client to play the video file directly by using a terminal or a page, without needing to transcode the video file after the video file is downloaded.
However, in the foregoing manner, the video transcoding server generally uses serial transcoding, where transcoding of a film often needs dozens of minutes, and multiple times of file transmission (in which the server side first transmits the file to the video transcoding server, the video transcoding server then transmits the file to the storage server, and the storage server finally transmits the file to the client) during the transcoding also cost a long period of time.
In order to improve transcoding efficiency, some related technologies have already been provided in the industry. However, on the other side, a relationship between transcoding and storage is not considered in any of the designs in these related technologies, and specialized hardware is needed in all the designs to perform segmentation, transcoding, and merging operations, which increases costs of hardware, and also increases complexity of transcoding. In addition, a lot of existing distributed transcoding systems are based on a client/server (C/S) mode, and as long as the number of machines in the systems is slightly changed, distributed programs need to be recoded and redeployed, which has poor scalability. Transcoding and merging of CPU and I/O load on the machines are difficult to be controlled.
In summary, an existing network audio and video transcoding manner has problems such as large time consumption, low efficiency, high costs of hardware, and poor scalability.